Literacy Matters - Vol 21 - Winter 2021

that helped form her identity (Figure 3). For instance, Katie noted how she enjoyed a variety of writing experiences as a child (e.g. she frequently wrote stories, notes, and postcards) but once she entered middle school, formulaic writing became her norm and she was flooded with writing experiences divorced from choice and authenticity. She recalled how one teacher,

look at my writing at least ten times personally before I shared my writing with my tutor. No matter how many times I felt I had written something correctly, it never was. I  don’t write for pleasure because the reaction I have always received from any reader was that my writing was wrong. Wrong spelling, bad grammar and even worse sentence structure never failed to embarrass me in front of my classmates or teachers. Figure 4 Maria’s Writing History. As Katie conferred with Maria about her writing history, she realized they both experienced feedback that impeded, rather than

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grew them as writers. As a result of rejection and fear of judgement, their self-concept and identity as writers became limited. Reflecting on her writing experiences as a teacher of writing, Maria recognized the influential role a teacher can play in developing students’ identities as writers. She stated, “I learned I won’t be a teacher who stunts a writer’s growth with my feedback.” When we examine our own identities as writers, we can reflect and examine how our values and practices influence our teaching, our priorities, and how this impacts the young writers in our classrooms. Through their own experiences, Katie and Maria learned the value in creating safe spaces for students to take risks as writers, find their voices, and develop identities as writers.

Figure 3 Katie’s Writing History

Supportive Classroom Structures: Engaging in theWriting Process The preservice teachers enrolled in Katie’s literacy methods course engaged in their own writing process. A daybook, similar to a writer’s notebook, served as a container for their ideas, drafts, snippets of writing, reflections, as well as for note taking throughout the semester (Brannon, Griffin, Haag, Iannone, Urbanski, &Woodward, 2008; Fletcher & Portalupi, 2001; Murray, 1985). The daybook offered a private, safe space where the preservice teachers took risks, experimented, and developed their ideas and writing craft without the pressures of perfection. Their daybooks were unique and evolved as the individual writer transformed over the course of the semester. The daybooks could serve as models for their own future students when creating and maintaining their own daybooks. The preservice teachers used the daybooks as a tool during Writer’s Workshop to engage in their own writing processes through the exploration of genres, topics, and a range of craft and process lessons. After various pre-writing lessons including heart maps (Heard, 2016) and place maps (Fletcher, 2005), the preservice teachers each selected an idea to develop into a published piece. For the writing experience to be meaningful, they were encouraged to select a topic that mattered to them with a purpose other than receiving a grade and an audience beyond the instructor. Although time was provided in class for brainstorming, drafting, revising, and

yielding a red pen, saturated her writing with negative markings and affixed a large D to the top of her page with no feedback. Upon reflecting on her own writing experiences, she vowed to make sure this practice was not replicated in her own classroom teaching. Katie asked the preservice teachers to reflect on their own experiences as writers during their K-12 experiences and consider implications for their own teaching practices. When reflecting on her writing history (Figure 4), Maria explores the pressures of writing “correctly” and identifying with her writing as always being “wrong”. Limited by an overemphasis on grammar and mechanics, Maria’s writing was stifled and left her feeling inadequate and embarrassed. Thus, she chose not to write for pleasure and felt apprehension and anxiety when composing writing for assigned school work. My writing history was a struggle. It took me what seemed like forever to learn how to write. How words sounded in my ears, and how they looked on paper were never identical. I never understood why “uv” was incorrect and “of” was correct. Even more confusing to me was how teachers expected me to know how to use a dictionary to write words I couldn’t even begin to guess how to spell. As I got older I worked diligently throughout school to master writing, but it never became easy, and I constantly felt my writing was subpar. I only wrote when I had to, but always had to

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